Investigation and detection: Back to the future
| Published date | 01 December 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14613557241298860 |
| Author | Martin Innes |
| Date | 01 December 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: 25th Anniversary |
Investigation and detection:
Back to the future
Martin Innes
Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute, Cardiff University, UK
Abstract
This article reflects upon the key insights and evidence from policing research with regards to the organisation and con-
duct of police crime investigations and detective work. In particular, it attends to how a number of innovative technologies
have had a shaping effect on this aspect of the police role. A central thread of the argument developed is how shifts in the
context for policing, associated with the information environment has been inducing socio-technical changes to how
crimes are investigated and resolved. Projecting forward from such developments, the article concludes by speculating
on the ways the increasing availability of ’opensource intelligence’might reconfigure the social organisation of police
crime investigations.
Keywords
Police, crime investigations, detective work, open-source intelligence
One of the abiding functions of academic scholarship on the
police should be to detect and describe some of the deeper
patterns of thinking and doing that shape the organisation
and conduct of policing. Police research should not just
be about instrumentally evaluating the most recent innov-
ation being implemented to solve a currently pressing
problem in order to divine evidence of ‘what works’or
does not, although that is important. A significant propor-
tion of the collective policing studies effort needs to be
directed to digging beneath the surfaces of current policy
and practice, to identify what is shaping and structuring
these and their trajectories of development.
It is precisely this quality that underpinned and is shared
by all the ‘classic’and ‘seminal’studies upon which our
contemporary approaches to studying and understanding
policing have been built. Albeit focused on different
facets of policing and how it is performed across different
times and places, the findings and insights that were
derived from careful and meticulous data collection and
interpretation of the available evidential sources, did
cohere into a broadly generalisable picture of what policing
is, how it gets done and why it sometimes fails.
However, one striking observation about these founda-
tional studies was that, with a few notable exceptions,
they largely neglected the work of detectives and crime
investigation. This is in spite of the fact that the public
understanding of crime and policing has always been
strongly guided by both fictional and factual depictions of
crime detection in the media. The investigation of heinous
crimes and the attribution of criminal responsibility for
these, have undoubtedly had an ‘outsized’influence upon
the public imagination.
Framing the issues in this way is helpful for reviewing
changes in the state-of-the-art over the past 25 years as it
pertains to crime investigation, for it reminds us that
although some things have changed and evolved, much
has also remained more or less the same. This is an import-
ant point inasmuch as the base motivations for how and
why people engage in behaviours that are defined as crim-
inal are pretty universal and constant. It is also the case that
in the aftermath of such acts, police investigators are always
charged with answering two fundamental questions: (a)
‘Has a crime, as defined in law, probably taken place?’;
Corresponding author:
Martin Innes, Security, Crime and Intelligence Innovation Institute, Cardiff
University, Cardiff, UK.
Email: InnesM@cardiff.ac.uk
Special Issue: 25th Anniversary
International Journal of
Police Science & Management
2024, Vol. 26(4) 434–437
© The Author(s) 2024
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14613557241298860
journals.sagepub.com/home/psm
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